France, who in her outward relations has generally had a feverish longing for change, has been in literary and artistic respects, as a rule, exceedingly conservative, has upheld authority, supported an academy, and prized limitations and proportion above everything. They had upset the monarchy, murdered the hated aristocrats, built up the republic, done away with Christianity before they ever thought of touching the three unities of the drama. Voltaire, who had a reverence for nothing in heaven or earth, respected the received treatment of the Alexandrine verse. And David, the great painter of the Revolution, who cast the pictures of Boucher out of the Louvre, and whose pupils used to shoot bread-crumbs at Watteau's masterpiece, the "Voyage à Cythère," yet conveyed with him into the new age, as an inheritance from _rococo_, its prodigious knowledge. The good old traditions of the technique of French painting were little shaken by him and his school. The Academy described by Quatremère as the "eternal nursery garden of incurable prejudices," was indeed overthrown, but David became immediately the head of a new one. This age of absorption in politics developed an art to correspond, more disciplined than ever, girt round by an iron cuirass; and this art, notwithstanding multifarious phases, at no time lost its touch, technically, with the acquisitions of former epochs, but evolved itself in its various directions from one centre, distracted from its path by nothing brought into it from outside. Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet, widely as they differ from one another, are links in one chain of evolution. Art comes from knowledge. This maxim, which David held in honour, has remained to the present day a dominant force in French art, and by virtue of this knowledge, which David received from the old masters and guarded as a sacred trust, France became in the nineteenth century the chief school of technique for all other nations. From the French the other nations learned their grammar and syntax; through them they acquired a wider horizon and a deeper insight into the great mystery of nature. [Decoration] BOOK II THE ESCAPE INTO THE PAST CHAPTER V THE NAZARENES